Not as much visible progress as I would have liked; there is one of those “thanks for playing” exit screens now, and yes, I did make that first test flight mentioned in my last post! Not very interesting at that point, but at least, I could experiment a little with Asteroids style control (rotate + thrust) vs the classic Kobo Deluxe style controls (aim and go in the direction indicated).

Right now, I have a control system that’s much like that of Kobo Deluxe, but the ship is actually driven by physics (ie mass, inertia, forces, acceleration etc), using a set of thrusters for power and control.

The advantage of using actual physics is that I get that nice, smooth, realistic feel, along with actual data to use for rendering the ship and thruster flames. Also, I can very easily have the ship respond sensibly to projectile impact, collisions and whatnot; just apply the forces and let the physics deal with it.

The downside is that “real” physics demands real control engineering! Typical naïve methods will only have the ship wobble uncontrollably, just as it would in real life. Fortunately, I’ve spent some 12 years doing control engineering for a living, so I can probably figure that part out.

Oh, the ship has cannons too! Two sets even; one that’s much like the forward cannon from the old Kobo Mk I (the ship in Kobo Deluxe, that is), and one that spews out a massive, cool (er, I mean hot…) looking stream of… lava or something. The latter was just the result of my initial experiments, but it might show up somewhere, in some form.

I’m thinking of dropping the tail cannon of Kobo Mk I, and use two weapons instead; a primary nose cannon and secondary tail mounted device that drops a bunch of small bombs or similar. The latter would be mostly a defensive weapon, to get enemies off your tail. I’ll play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t – but first, I need some enemies…!

Well, bad news first: Yesterday, I lost many hours to an old, nasty bug in my EEL scripting engine.

The good news: I cracked the bug! Turned out to be memory corruption due to the VM allocating one byte to few for a “stack” used for memory managing VM register variables. (EEL has an oddball automatic memory management solution, due to it being targeted at realtime applications. Reference counting with a few shortcuts, basically.) This had gone undetected as it only happens when you have a multiple of 16 register variables in a function.

Also, I now have an “Olofson Arcade presents” screen, a title screen with a nice, animated logo, and some nice code to play around with. So, now I can throw some game logic in the mix! I intend to take the Kobo Mk II for a first test flight some time today.

Hello there, LD community and whoever else might read this!

I’m new around here, but not totally new to game development. Some might have heard of some Free game I’m messing around with every now and then, and maybe even seen some programming example of mine, involving a pig.

Anyway, after spending way too much time figuring out what tools to use, working on my new site, Olofson Arcade, and various other things, I’ve finally decided what to do, and (roughly) how.

[...]
So, some time ago, I decided that I’ll just wrap Kobo Deluxe up and finish it according to the original design goals: “An enhanced version of Akira Higuchi’s game XKobo.” Nothing more, nothing less. It’s a small, retro styled game for hardcore arcade fanatics, and that’s the way it should stay, modulo some easier skill levels for the occasional joystick wizard wannabe.

Now, what to do with all those ideas that had accumulated, all the unofficial experiments, all the neat graphics tricks that wouldn’t really work without OpenGL, and all that? But of course: A sequel!
[...]

Full story here.

David